A Short Biography:

Alapakkam P. (Sam) Sampath is a Professor of Ophthalmology and Neurobiology at UCLA, and the Associate Director of the Jules Stein Eye Institute.  After completing his Ph.D. in 1999 in physiology at UCLA, he did postdoctoral fellowships at Stanford and the University of Washington before joining USC as an Assistant Professor in 2005.  He moved his laboratory to UCLA in 2013.  Sam is the Principal Investigator on several NIH grants to study how the retina encodes light entering the eye in both health and disease.  Over the past decade his laboratory has led efforts to determine how the retina encodes visual information under very dim light, or for night vision.  During this time his lab has identified the biological mechanisms that allow our high visual sensitivity, and how these mechanisms malfunction in night blindness.  Sam is the recipient of the Karl Kirschgessner Junior Faculty Award and received a Scholar Award from the McKnight Endowment Fund for Neuroscience.  His current research remains focused on how the photoreceptor cells, the rods and cones, are activated by light and how these signals are processed in the retinal circuity.